


phone calls

by kingdavidbowie



Category: Spider-Man (Comicverse), Spider-Man - All Media Types, The Amazing Spider-Man (Movies - Webb), Ultimate Spider-Man (Cartoon)
Genre: M/M, flash and family issues, flash geeks out over spider-man, harry and family issues, harry has nothing to do, shared issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-27 16:39:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1717409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingdavidbowie/pseuds/kingdavidbowie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This was probably the kind of lifestyle that produced supervillains, he realized. Rich guys with nothing to do and not many friends, nothing better to do than blow things up. Well, he'd gotten bored of playing with lighters and over-exercising and making plans to change the world, too.</p>
<p>There was still the phone number scribbled in pen across the front of his math notebook. He wondered what had possessed Flash Thompson to so suddenly come up to him in the school hallway and ask him out. He wondered what had possessed him to say yes. But that was easy, it was the same reason he did anything: why not? Because what was the worst that could happen? Hadn't it already?</p>
<p>(phone calls between Harry and Flash, one-shot. probably.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	phone calls

He sort of had a mental checklist for Saturdays: get up and everything that went along with that, breakfast (or something similar), television. When he got sick of staring at the screen he went outside. When it got too hot out or too cold he went back inside, paged through homework and textbooks. Snacked. Napped. Internet. Nothing really stuck. He thought a lot about getting a hobby but he hadn't found one yet.

This was probably the kind of lifestyle that produced supervillains, he realized. Rich guys with nothing to do and not many friends, nothing better to do than blow things up. Well, he'd gotten bored of playing with lighters and over-exercising and making plans to change the world, too.

There was still the phone number scribbled in pen across the front of his math notebook. He wondered what had possessed Flash Thompson to so suddenly come up to him in the school hallway and ask him out. He wondered what had possessed him to say yes. But that was easy, it was the same reason he did anything: why not? Because what was the worst that could happen? Hadn't it already?

He'd already gone through the checklist a dozen times by early afternoon and he doubted his dad would be back before dinner. The lady who cleaned up the house was off today, otherwise he might have bothered her with conversation for a while. He'd tried calling Peter earlier but his phone had been off again, he'd chatted with Mary Jane in the comments of her blog (since he so often had nothing better to do than read it) but she was offline now.

There was still that phone number.

On a whim he grabbed his phone and punched the number in before he could chicken out. (Why would he be scared, anyway? He talked to people all the time.) But the dial tones still made his stomach feel a little queasy.  
  
"Harry?"

\-----------------

"You sound really out of breath," said Harry's voice. Flash glanced left and right before sinking down against the fence.

"Just finished with basketball practice," he explained, loosening his shirt collar as he spoke to let more fresh air in. "Fun stuff there."

"Especially since you guys are so great and all."

Flash rolled his eyes, even if it was pointless, since Harry couldn't see it over the phone. "We can't all be me," he said rather haughtily but with an innocent shrug. So they'd lost almost every game so far this year. He'd gotten used to it, anyway.

He could almost hear Harry smiling just slightly over the speaker. "Yeah, I bet Spider-man goes to sleep every night and prays he could be more like you, Flash."

"No doubt," he agreed without hesitation, smiling back. He didn't feel like an idiot doing that, just aware that he probably should have. "What're you up to?"

"Watching this guy mow my lawn from my window. I have no life," Harry announced guiltlessly.

"Want me to come over?"

"To mow my lawn?"

"No, to- hang out! Why, do you want me to?" He was curious.

"I wouldn't mind. But today we can order a pizza or something."

"I'll leave that to you."

"Already handling it."

He looked around again and then got up as he closed the phone.

\---------------

His dad hadn't come home again today. Not that it'd been a few days consecutively, but it'd been a few times in the last week or two. A few days of waiting to eat dinner and then doing it and feeling awkward putting away the leftovers because they just piled up in the fridge until he ate them himself later. A few days of rebelliously staying up in some sort of doomed hope that his dad would come in and tell him to go to sleep. A few days of silence.

When he was a kid it had happened rarely, and it'd been fun. Jumping on beds and messing up the house and falling down staircases, leaving everything for the housekeeper to clean up in his wake. If his dad hadn't been around then, at least he'd been more present when he had been.

Now, it wasn't quite that great.

Before going to bed he dialed Flash's number. He'd be asleep this late at night, but Harry just wanted to listen to the recorded answering message anyway.

\-------------

While he was dialing Harry's number it occurred to Flash that he'd never actually called Harry; it had been the other way around the other times. It felt sort of normal even though it was new.

"Who're you talking to?" his sister asked him, sitting down next to him on his bed. There was no such thing as his closed door doing anything in this house, especially not with Jesse. He grimaced at her and tried waving her away, but it was just effective as, if not less than, the door.

"No one, it's still ringing- oh, hey, Harry."

He tried to ignore the fact that she was listening and, possibly worse, smiling. "Yeah, I'm sorry, but I can't come over- I'm watching my little sister." She frowned at that and mouthed something about not needing to be watched that was probably true; she was thirteen now. But their mother wanted him to be around anyway, and he could get that, too.  
  
He laughed at something Harry said and avoided catching the look Jesse was giving him. He felt a little self-conscious. "That was pretty funny," he agreed, grinning in spite of himself.

"Can I talk?"

He covered the phone with his hand. "To Harry? You don't even know him." But somehow the phone ended up in her hands anyway and she introduced herself and suddenly she and Harry were friends.

She kept slipping in questions and Flash just sighed because there wasn't really anything else he could do. After a few more minutes he was holding the phone and apologizing and Harry was telling him not to, he liked Jesse. Of course he did. Flash looked up to ask her something but she was gone, so he just kept talking to Harry, all the while wondering what he'd said when Jesse had asked him whether or not he liked girls.

\----------------

He'd been walking home from school when some villain with a giant glue gun had come onto the street scene dodging cars and shooting at people (including Flash, but he'd dodged). Then Spider-man had appeared, swinging from what seemed like nowhere on his web lines and calling out witty comments at the other guy. He sounded different than the action figure of him Flash had used to see in stores and want to get, but they both had the same sense of vivaciousness, he thought. Or sarcasm. His inner child was screaming at him to get closer, to take pictures, to run up to the edge of the street with the rest of the neighborhood kids and yell and wave at Spider-man, but he just stopped on the sidewalk to watch.

He slipped. The phone was in his hands, his fingers were already dialing, shaking just slightly.  
  
"Harry, Spider-man is on the same street my grocery store is," he whispered into the speaker, trying now not to contain himself but to keep his geeky man-crush in control, at the very least.

Harry laughed. "I think he was by mine a few weeks ago, too."

"You have a fancy-as-hell grocery store, people rob it all the time and Spider-man has to fight them off, of course you did," Flash assumed, his eyes not leaving the red and blue blurs flashing across his vision.

"I haven't gone grocery shopping in forever; usually the housekeeper does."

"You should come with me sometime, it gets pretty crazy," Flash said, thinking of Jesse.

"So that's our first date? The grocery store by your house that was almost robbed just now?" And he remembered what this whole thing had been in the first place, him asking Harry out and giving him his number. Somewhere along the line he'd forgotten about the logistics of it and just started going with it because he liked talking to Harry.

"Best first date of your life," he assured Harry, and he watched as Spider-man knocked the guy out and strung him up for the police to take him away. He could already hear the sirens going. "Damn, though- I wish I had moves like he did, you know?" Spider-man was freaking awesome, he could admit it for just a second, at least.

"Yeah, you mentioned it."

\--------------------

He didn't want his only decent go-to to be calling Flash so Harry started running again, this time not as a crap escape or excuse but as a thing. A good thing. He didn't really think while he ran away from the house and down the road, just listened to music and kept going until he felt like sitting. And he'd do that for a while, then get back up again and start running. It was a single-minded, non-corrupted sort of thing and it appealed to him.

He kept his phone on him even though he didn't ever call Flash on his runs; sometimes it was the other way around and he stopped and sat down on the grass and talked and it was him breathing heavy into the phone this time.

His dad was around less and less and the housekeeper lady had looked worried about Harry, but he'd assured her he was alright. Afterwards, when he realized that he was almost being honest, he marveled at it.

\--------------------

His father got home from work. His father got home and threw his mom into a wall, and the only good thing he did was leave her there instead of come back and do it again. The bad thing, the worse thing he did involved Flash and it wasn't nearly as pleasant as being thrown into a wall.

His phone was about as smashed as his wrist, but he had Harry's number memorized by now so maybe after they'd treated their mom he could borrow Jesse's phone to call Harry, if he felt like it.

\--------------------

"What about this Saturday? You doing anything?"

"When?"

"I never do anything, whenever you're free."

"Two?"

"Sure, works for me."

"Of course it does."

"That's hilarious, Flash."

"Hey, you said it."

\------------------

Harry felt somewhat conspicuous driving over to Flash's place in one of his dad's cars, considering that the least conspicuous of them was still flashy as hell, but seeing Flash's house made things a little better. It looked homey, like one of those four-member family houses all typical and such but still very close and warm. He'd used to deny the fact that he wanted one of those, one of those families or at least one of those houses, but now he could admit that he did, if only inside of his head. Maybe to Flash, later.

Lights in the windows, two-car garage. He called Flash's sister's number (apparently he'd dropped his in the toilet or something).

Picket fence. There was a freaking picket fence around the front of the yard. "Oh, hey- I'm here. Yeah, I see you-" He squinted through the window. "What happened to your arm?"

The christmas lights still hanging from the edge of the roof.


End file.
